What Makes a House Old?
March 19th, 2009, 3 Comments »
We’re spending a couple of nights out in rural Texas–the so-called Hill Country–at the Inn Above Onion Creek. It’s this charming country inn with about eight rooms on 100 acres of rolling country. I went for a really nice walk this morning with the very spry three-legged dog that lives here. Part of it passed through a deciduous forest, which is a rare site for a west coaster like myself.
The Inn itself is comprised of a couple of large buildings and some outlying cabins. To the uneducated eye, they look like they’ve been on the property for at least a hundred years. In fact, it’s fairly new, but uses a tremendous amount of reclaimed materials. The doors, floorboards, fixtures and furniture all appear to date back to the early part of the century or earlier.
Here’s an unflattering photo of our room. It doesn’t convey any of the space’s charms. I find it hard to take good, truthful photos of interior spaces–but you can see that it’s full of period detail:
I wouldn’t claim that it’s a heritage building, but the aesthetic does kind of beg the question ‘what makes a house old?’ How much of a house must be ‘original’ for us to, informally, declare it a heritage building?
I’m reminded of the building that houses the Victoria Art Gallery, which is an odd chimera of a 19th century mansion, a modernist expansion in the fifties and a renovation a few years ago. Is still an old house?